I received an e-mail the other day and started writing a response to it. A strong sense of déjà vu swept over me and I thought, "I've written this reply before!" It only took a little digging to find what I was remembering. I received a message about pretty much the same thing from a different person. Here is that message and here's what I wrote in response here on October 20, 2010…
Here's an excerpt from another one of those messages from someone who's not making much money as a professional writer and wants some advice. I don't claim my advice is worth more than anyone else's but if you want to heed it, I won't stop you. In the following, I've redacted a long list of projects that the author sees as inarguable dreck. I cut it because the discussion really isn't about those works and because a couple were written by friends of mine…
…the thing that gets to me is that I watch TV and I read comics and I see work being bought that is so obviously inferior to what I do. It wouldn't bother me so much if I thought I was being beaten out by better people but some of the shows today like [LONG LIST DELETED] just stun me. My wife is sick of hearing me screaming at the TV set or throwing down some comic I brought home from the shop. I could cope with the rejection if I felt the contest was fair and that the judges didn't have their heads up their butts. How do you think I should deal with this?
By ignoring it. Really. The field in which you and I are working is a flawed meritocracy. It's all about the best work rising to the top…and sometimes, it does. But we've all seen studio heads greenlight the wrong movie, network programmers buy the wrong series, publishers publish the wrong manuscript, etc. That is never going to change and to get mad at it is like getting mad that your favorite baseball player sometimes strikes out.
Actually, I should back up here and note that when you see, for example, a TV show where the writing seems to suck, you are not seeing the writing the writer did. You're seeing his or her work after it has been through a process…perhaps rewritten by others, certainly interpreted by actors and a director, changed or skewed by many hands. It is entirely possible (in some situations, almost probable) that your wonderful script could endure that process and by the time it hit the air, it would be no better than what you're decrying…and some frustrated writer would see it and his wife would hear him yell about how being rejected when that kind of debris was selected. A writer-friend of mine who left us too soon, Bill Rotsler, used to have a saying that came to mind as I typed the above. It was, "Those who think they are the exceptions are wrong."
But even if rotten work is getting bought, don't let that anger you. In fact, don't let anything in this area anger you. Being mad can be one of the best ways to not get hired. There was a writer I used to run into at Guild functions and committee meetings who couldn't utter two contiguous sentences without one of them being about the crappy show he saw last night and how in the name of all that's holy does that garbage get bought when his brilliance goes unbought and unproduced? Having never read one word he's written, I honestly have no idea if he truly was as good as he seemed to think…but I do know that if I were in a position to hire writers, he's about the last guy I'd consider. Who wants to work with a screaming maniac?
There was a time in my past when I used to think of other writers as competition, as if the successes they enjoyed somehow subtracted from what was possible for me. When I stopped thinking that way — stopped caring about how well someone else was doing at all — I got a lot happier as a writer…and, I think, a little better. I have tons of flaws and shortcomings and weaknesses but that was one I was able (I think) to get rid of. It involved a realization that the system isn't "fair" in the way we'd like it to be. The buyers are not going to always select the best writers any more than the voters are always going to select the best candidates. Stop expecting otherwise and just do your best work…because the system doesn't always fail.